INTROSPECTION
“Maybe, after all, writing for me is not a gift or a pastime or a luxury. It is a necessity.”
I’m growing old with every experience I go through. Things, terrible things I see and yet do not allow myself to feel. Things I do feel with all of my turbulent being and yet wait with bated breath and a racing heart to stop happening.
Because I know if I let the wall of indifference down even for a moment, I won’t be able to get over a single one of the things my life as a doctor forces me to witness in a day. I won’t be able to keep standing and doing whatever I’m required to keep alive a 20-year-old girl burnt alive. I cannot tell what is what. The deep red henna stain on the soles of her feel blur into the charred and peeling skin. Trying to hold down a strange maniacal woman at 4 am in ER bleeding with a shattered jaw and broken teeth.
At those moments I wonder the strange nature of the job I’ve chosen. To find yourself there for people, complete and absolute strangers; people you would otherwise never have met – there, completely abandoned and at the mercy of any kindness, any effort that you could spare to stand between them and the agonising pain or looming death.
There comes a point when you have no choice but to go on with an emotional blindfold in order to think straight, to get up and deal with it. Things I dare not give a voice to, at times for their grave enormity, at others for their scandalous nature.
Some days I’m afraid I’ll be punished for not being compassionate enough. For wanting to run away in situations where I’m expected to be eager to help.
How do you force it when you do not have it in you?
When you’re no longer the ‘kind’ kind. Or never really were to begin with.
When misery makes you angry.
When pain makes you angry.
When sickness makes you angry.
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I am beginning to feel I am avoiding life. I wait for days, weeks, months to be over; wishing for no moment to linger, no hour to stay – even the ones of peace – a hyperacute sense of their transience being too harrowing, too handicapping for me to be able to live in them.
I feel I am going to live the rest of my life like this.
What you do not say, what you deny yourself to feel, what you unknowingly push somewhere deep in an attempt to avoid confronting, afraid of being overcome by it all, all of it grows on you, weighs you down, ages you beyond your years. The weight of so much unsaid, seen yet unprocessed and unfelt is added each day to the burden.
Each morning I carry a heavier load than I did the night past.
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There’s no moment of peace to begin with. The good things, the things that are supposed to feel good, turn into compulsions that I feel the need to rush through and get over with when I at last find the leisure.
I cannot figure out if it is better to stay buried in a robotic routine of overwhelming obligations that I fervently hate so that the emptiness and dissatisfaction of free hours become a faded, rose-tinted memory that I am deluded into longing for.
God knows it is slowly driving me insane.
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My brain seems to have knotted on itself as I contorted my facial muscles into the inconvenience of a 5-minute cry. The consequential headache wasn’t worth the self-demonstration that I still had a remnant of raw, human emotion left.
That reminds me, I haven’t cried in a long, long time.
The last time – lying in the doctor’s room of the dilapidated Lady Willingdon Hospital – first ever night duty as a doctor.
Oh the loneliness, the utter desolation. Lahore’s humid, choking summer night air. From the window overlooking the minarets of Badshahi mosque engulfed in the dark. The sound of new mothers moaning with post-operative pain in the dark ward. Newborns wailing at their sides, God knows why.
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How do you, for once, draw a breath that could be a testimony to being alive and not just an exhausting exercise in the mere imitation of it?
What shouldn’t make a difference and what should? And what of the head and heart and their thousand anamolies?
At some point you need to find out who this person you host inside is.
My own disorientation is what is all so real, so terrible.
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The problem with being too rational, too intelligent is that it becomes impossible to talk yourself out of your depression. You already know everything. Anything, anybody could tell you, you already know and it does not make any difference.
One of those times I remember being asked what I needed to feel better. Anything I want, they said.
And I remember saying out of utter powerlessness and guilt that I could not think of a single thing on earth, which could stop making me feel the miserable emptiness I felt.
That is it, that’s the scariest of things.
Whatever logic your highly evolved sanity conjures, your insanity nullifies with a counter logic.
And most of the time, there is no logic to how terrible you feel. You respond emotionally to everything that happens around you, to things not remotely relevant to you, against your will, against your better judgment. And you suffer because of things you cannot control or things that need not be controlled.
All I know is that it takes ten times the effort to imitate the normalcy that my contemporaries so effortlessly enjoy.
That 90 percent of my mental, emotional and physical energy is consumed in trying to maintain a normal facade in life.
How I’m acutely aware of the damper it puts on my intellectual capabilities, how it physically exhausts me and reduces my stamina for professional duties.
How it impacts relationships and formal exchanges of everyday life.
How the only clear perception of life I have is that it is an exhausting struggle to keep up.
Faking care so well in moments where I absolutely do not give a damn, where I am wholely resentful, and somehow successfully pretending not to care at all when I really do.
I cannot decide whether it is the greatest strength or a crippling flaw that you enter a room full of people feeling so miserable you could scream, so drained you’re hardly managing to breathe. But, as soon as you open your mouth to speak, you are surprised to find yourself under an overpowering influence that imparts a ring to your voice you no longer thought you had the energy to produce; wit you never thought you could conjure with so much chaos beneath your surface; a wide smile telling an even wider lie.
I feel trapped in a compulsively pretentious cage that does not let me reveal myself, that is somehow tuned to contradict and cover whatever I feel. It is a saving grace many a times and yet it does not leave a crack to breathe through, to call for help, to let anybody get a glimpse of the distress, the acute discontent, the despair, the slow death.
Do you ever feel that you are unwilling to feel better?
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It’s a misfortune to be that person too outwardly reasonable and calm to have anyone worry about them. For there never seems to be a right time to say you’re tired, that you’ve had enough. There always seems to be too much at stake. There is always something or the other to see to first.
You simply cannot afford the luxury to break down until a time comes you are no longer able to – no matter what hell breaks lose inside or outside of you.
You may come out of those times with a brief sense of triumph that might even strengthen you in some way, adding to your resplendent track record of nerves of steel.
But it weakens you.
With no time to breathe, no time to heal, it keeps coming back more often and in flashes that turn to longer and longer moods until you go days and weeks yearning to feel normal. Until choking unhappiness and discontent become a way of life. Your own paranoia and the lack of support keep you from breathing a word; knowing too well how admitting to your weakness would give them visible satisfaction, which is the last thing you want.
No, you’d rather lie and pretend, paint and polish and perfume – in raging contrast to what is actually going on.
In trying to feel better momentarily, we leave lies everywhere.
We aid the spread of malcontent by lying about ourselves.